Hisense A9G (55A9G, 65A9G) review

Hisense A9G (55A9G, 65A9G) review

One minute review

The 65A9G sees Hisense return to the OLED TV fray for the first time since 2019: It's a XNUMX-inch model that offers the frequent 'every pixel makes its own light and color' benefit that has made OLED so popular with home entertainment enthusiasts. However, its charms do not end there. Its feature list also includes support for the premium HDR Dolby Vision and HDR10+ formats, as well as the popular HDR10 and HLG systems.. Its smart functionality is provided by Hisense's increasingly acceptable smart VIDAA system. And perhaps most promising of all, the 65A9G has been rated by IMAX as a good enough image performer to offer the advantages of its IMAX Enhanced Content Mastery System. The 65A9G also does some extra care with its audio, in the form of Dolby Atmos playback supported by a built-in soundbar and dedicated drivers. It's also a bit cheaper than its 65-inch OLED contenders, despite having great sound quality and great picture quality. So what's the downside? Contenders like the LG C1 OLED offer superior gaming features and consistently great picture quality for little more money.

Prices and availability

Hisense A9Gs are widely available in the UK and the rest of Europe, and cost slightly less than competing OLED models. For example, the 65A9G considered here is lower than LG's equivalent 65C1 model by about $100. However, there doesn't seem to be any evidence yet that Hisense is ready to launch the A9G OLED TVs in its US or Australian markets anytime soon. The Hisense A9G OLED (Image credit: John Archer)

Integrated

Hisense A9G Specifications

OLED TV Hisense 2021 (Image credit: Hisnese) The appearance of the Hisense 65A9G is indeed interesting. It sits on your desk stand, flush with the surface of your table, and is so large near the bottom 2-thirds of its back that it comfortably accommodates 2 heavy-duty metal inserts that protrude from the heavy-duty, desk-mounted stand. center. To make sure the screen can't be tilted forward, Hisense provides some ballast weights that need to be screwed into either side of the rear 'foot', while support at the front is provided by a large bar. This speaker bar features an attractive silver, metallic, and grilled finish and feels strong and durable enough to do some real sound damage in the right direction. The soundbar saves when it comes to reproducing the TV's Dolby Atmos sound reproduction via 2 face-up activated drivers and a dedicated bass monitor on the "fat" back of the TV. Although most of the back of the TV is quite deep by today's standards, the 65A9G is actually exceedingly thin near its top edges, barely an inch deep in truth. Keep in mind that the screen tilts very slightly on its stand, rather than being directly upright. The TV comes with an amazing remote control that is reminiscent of the premium Bang & Olufsen brand phones with its metallic silver finish and very stylish angled knobs. It's also nice to see direct buttons present for Netflix, Amazon Prime Video, Freeview Play, YouTube and Rakuten. The connections of the Hisense 65A9G, finally, are a mixed bag. The good news is that there are 4 HDMI, as well as an optical digital audio input and two USB. The bad news is that none of the HDMI can handle 4K at 120Hz, depriving owners of PS5, Xbox Series X, and the latest premium PC cards of the smoothest, cleanest experience their devices can get. HDMIs will support different refresh rates, but only up to XNUMXHz, and can support eARC lossless Dolby Atmos audio pass-through. It also supports the automatic low latency mode function, through which compatible sources can prompt the TV when to activate and deactivate the perfect game picture mode, depending on the genre of content being played on the console. All 4 HDMI ports on the pricier €65 LG OLED1C100 accept 4K 120Hz, as well as Nvidia and AMD flavors of variable refresh rate technology. The Hisense A9G OLED (Image credit: John Archer)

Smart TV (VIDAA)

Hisense's VIDAA smart TV platform is gradually becoming more like Android TV. The home page fills the entire screen with large, easy-to-read icons that provide direct links to standalone apps and, the moment an app accepts it, displays programs carried by the app you've used most recently. The top 2 rows of app links can easily have their order of execution adapted (except, annoyingly, Netflix seems to be locked into place as their first app, surely on the back of a Hisense/Netflix pact ), the system runs smoothly and stable and there is built-in support for the Google Assistant and Alexa voice recognition systems. It's also nice that you can scroll down to access other app-specific content link shelves. The only bad news is the lack of support for Apple TV + and Disney +.

Image quality

The picture quality of Hisense's first OLED TVs, the 05BUK lineup from 2019, fell well short of the competition. Fortunately, the 65A9G offers a marked improvement, although it still falls short of its main rivals in certain areas. Perhaps the best improvement comes from its handling of dark scenes. It manages to present black colors with all the depth and purity we associate with quality OLED pictures, without a trace of the kind of gray that can infuse dark scenes to a point on virtually any LCD TV. The 65A9G also offers those traditional OLED black levels with good stability, and also avoids the tendency for base brightness levels to flicker and jump subtly through pitch-dark scenes that can still plague some OLED TVs. As long as you don't use the poorly designed HDR Day and HDR Night presets, the colors are stunning too. Rich and vibrant, yet also natural and nuanced. There's not quite as much out-of-the-box color accuracy as with the best competing OLEDs, and the calibration tools aren't as effective as those of the more "experienced" OLED brands. There's also not quite as much tonal finesse as there is in OLED TVs like the Sony A90J or one of Panasonic's 2021 OLED models with more powerful and refined processing engines. There can also sometimes be very slight clipping (loss of subtle shading detail) in exaggeratedly bright areas of color when watching violently overpowered 4K Blu-rays; however, unless you know what you're looking for, you may not notice this last drawback. The Hisense A9G OLED (Image credit: John Archer) The 65A9G delivers the sharpness and detail of native 4K sources quite well. You have to be a little careful with the sharpness settings on the TV; set it too high and images quickly start looking overly grainy and unnatural. Left fairly neutral, however, the 4A65G's 9K images exhibit the kind of clarity and added sense of depth that we now expect to see with native 4K content. Switching between HD and 4K football coverage via BBC iPlayer or Sky is a particularly simple and effective way to see just how much of a 65K “difference” the 9A4G offers. However, the 65A9G isn't that great at handling HD sources. Its scaled images look noticeably smoother than those provided by the best competitive scaling engines. Larger skin tones can appear plastic, and there's a lack of sophistication in fairly rough, texture-heavy areas like soccer fields, background crowds, and woods and brick shots. Colors also seem a bit patchy near the edges of objects with scaled content, and all but the 2 theater presets look saturated with SDR sources. Cinema presets, on the other hand, look quite desaturated and flat. There are other picture preset drawbacks as well, especially suddenly when it comes to Dolby Vision. For example, while Dolby Vision Dark Perfect mode offers the most extreme and exciting feeling of active range, such as the most accurate luminance levels with DV content, it also suppresses uncomfortable amounts of shadow detail, leaving dark areas of the screen hollow and artificial image. The Hisense A9G OLED (Image credit: John Archer) One of the possible reasons for the loss of shadow detail in the perfect Dolby Vision Dark mode is that the 65A9G isn't the brightest OLED TV on the market. The highest brightness measurement we were able to achieve on a white HDR box covering 10% of a black screen was 756 nits, and that's in the rather attractive Sport preset. The theater-related and IMAX-related presets were somewhere between 500 and 550 nits, a few hundred and hundreds of nits below what many OLED contenders are achieving this year. Dolby Vision IQ Perfect Mode records more or less on the preset day out of the box, continually optimizing images for the lighting conditions in your room. The downside is that it feels like the TV is applying some unbeatable little motion processing to DV IQ mode, which isn't helpful. The way the Cinema Night setting produces much brighter and more vibrant images than you get with the Cinema Day mode (although the ambient light sensor seems to be on by default with both modes) when probably.

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